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Bending over and adding DRM might not exaclty be a good thing, but I can see how it might be necessary if they want to stay relevant. Though I have to say they really should have waited with that until DRM actually becomes relevant to the Web, jumping on the DRM train this early is really sending the wrong signal. Anyway what they should have done it also just ship the anti-DRM messures right in the browser as well. Add a function to screen capture videos of your browser interaction isn't all that difficult and would have nicely shown just how pontless the whole DRM thing is.

Right now in Xubuntu: The WindowButtons/Taskbar shows the wrong windows when using multiple monitors, the xfce-volumed is constantly hanging, not registering volume keys and using the wrong soundcard, the indicator-applet is completely broken and putting apps into fullscreen doesn't work properly any more either with multiple monitors. Most of this used to work a year or two ago. It feels like XFCE is just getting more and more broken as time progresses. It's pretty frustrating, guess it's time to try Mate.

While 538PPI might be a bit overkill on a classical phone, those same screens are also used in the latest round of virtual reality headsets and they have still a long way to go before they get anywhere near human vision limits. And to go even further, Nvidia has demoed some microlens lightfield glasses a while a go and those need even more resolution then a classical headset display and who knows, if resolution keeps growing, having a lightfield display in your phone might actually start to become viable (meaning you could have a real 3D with proper focus, could hold your phone close to your face to use it as VR glasses and other funky sci-fi stuff).

Does XFS still shred your files on system crashes or power loss? FAQ claims they fixed that in 2.6.22, yet with 2.6.27 it was still shredding files like crazy for me. This was however years ago, has anything changed still then?

already had very low persistence (60Hz display refresh, same as the new OR, but horrid resolution)

"Persistence" in this case doesn't just mean a higher refresh rate, but the time the image is on the display. With a classical LCD the image is on the display all the time, that's ok when you read text on a monitor, however for VR this leads to artifacts. When the image is on all the time and you move your head your eyes will receive an incorrect image until the next frame shows up, this leads to a lot of blurring and judder. With low persistence on the other side a frame is just flashed for a short amount and then the display goes black again (kind of like a CRT), meaning your eyes will receive always the right information and the judder and blur disappear. The black in between frames is filtered away by your brain. Abrash has some nice blog entries on the topic.

Because the "wind in the sails" probably isn't as strong as you think.

Sony is now building their own VR headset for the PS4 with Project Morpheus, Valve already has VR support build into Steam, plenty of games started adding VR support and in the last year more virtual reality demos got produced then in the previous 20 years. Hard to tell how long the wind it will hold, but it's orders of magnitude stronger then what we had 20 years ago. It's also not limited to games, the current DevKit1, with all it's problems, is already used in a few non-game instalations, virtual fashion shows, movies, porn all that stuff. Also the nausea problems with VR have only recently been fixed with proper positional tracking and low persistence displays, something no previous consumer VR display had and that is critical for mass adoption. Given that the hype has been constantly growing ever since the first prototype was revealed almost two years ago, I doubt that VR will just fade away again, people want it, the price is cheap enough and it provides an experience that can't be provided by any other available technology.

You're saying that GoG has games on multiple platforms but you only get one platform's install when you buy the game?

No, I am saying that you get two. If I buy for example Strike Suit Zero on GoG I get Mac and Windows versions. If I buy it on Steam I get Mac, Windows and Linux versions. GoG simply doesn't offer Linux versions, even if they exist and the developers are willing to provide them. GoG so far has completely refused to offer any Linux support at all, even so there is absolutely no reason to not have that in this day and age. See also this popular wishlist item:

Simply going for multiple USB HDDs seems to be the obvious option (cheap, extendable, can be stored offsite and offline, etc.). However what would be some good Free Software to actually handle the backup? Common solutions such as duplicity, rsync, rdiff-backup, etc. all seem to assume that your backup target directory can hold the whole backup all at once and that the whole backup is online at the same time. While one can probably hack something together with union mounts to accomplish that, it seems like a very cumbersome and fragile solution.

Is there anything that allows you to just copy the data to a HDD and then plug-in a new one when the old one is full? Preferably in a data-format that is robust enough to handle some backup HDDs dieing without destroying the data on the other drives (i.e. no incremental changes across HDDs).

GOG doesn't have to pay anybody to offer a Linux version. When it comes to modern indie games all they have to do is give developers a place to upload them. With Mac versions they already do that, which you get for free if you bought the game. Only Linux versions are excluded. With those old DOS games things are a little bit trickier, as GOG themselves would need to do the porting work, but even that isn't exactly rocket science, DOSBox exist on Linux and simply offering the game as plain old.zip instead of self-extracting Windows installer would already go along way to make using GOG on Linux much easier. I really don't get why they avoid Linux as much as they do, as they could support it with very little extra work.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could go and download all the ported games that you originally bought for Windows?

With Steam you can do that. If you bought a game there, Steam gives you all the different OS versions there are and all the languages the game was released in. There are other shops (most annoyingly GOG) that won't give you a Linux version, even if it's available, but as long as you bought the game is on Steam or activated it on Steam with a key you'll be fine.

There's no "Linux obviously" about it. It's a matter of trust, and Linux or not, users are far too trusting of the applications they install.

I don't think it's a problem with user trust, given all of the viruses and malware I don't think many are left that have trust in software. I think the problem is that no desktop OS gives you an easy way to properly isolate apps from each other. In Linux I can fudge around with multiple user accounts and such, but it's generally a mess, if there would something as easy as "sandbox./your_untrustworthy_app" then people might actually use it.

While it would be nicer without DRM, DRM is really only a small piece of what makes the whole service. Take for example Linux versions, on Steam, you automatically get them when they become available for free. When you buy on GOG or physical discs you don't get them, either they aren't provided at all or you have to pay again for them. If you want to play a non-english version of a game you also have a much better chance at getting it on Steam then on any other service.

While that doesn't make the DRM go away, Steam does give me a lot more freedom on where and how I can play my games compared to other services. Would it be nice to have a DRM-free service with the same feature set as Steam? Sure, but as far as I know no one like it exists, closest thing is Humblebundle Store, which gives you both DRM-free versions as well as the Steam version, but they offer a lot less games then Steam at the moment.